Archive for the 'Jj Grey Mofro' Tag Under 'Soundcheck' Category

September 11th, 2011, 3:30 pm by BEN WENER, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

By any concert-going standard, this weekend's Doheny Days festival in Dana Point should be deemed a success. Several thousand seemingly happy people coped with parking shuttles, weird weather and occasionally testy technical issues (oh, those finicky event wristbands!) to eventually kick back, drink up some brew and catch mostly solid sets of sounds tailor-made for the beach.

It's the ninth staging of this mid-September multi-culti counterpart to spring's Doheny Blues Festival, yet it's also the first such bash since 2004. Actually, if you want to be real about it, this is the first true Doheny Days since before 9/11. What began in the late '90s with a mix of rock varieties (classic, alt, punk) plus traces of funk and world-beat eventually went full-tilt reggae for its final three incarnations (2002-04). The last one wasn't even a proper two-day event; it got paired with an equally smaller dose of Doheny Blues.

So the 2011 remodeling looked like a winner on paper, thanks to a lineup that gets at the essence of what Doheny Days tried to be all those years ago.

Saturday wound up a smooth blend of soulful rock and reggae, with a so-so Ben Harper performance capping an afternoon that belonged to Donavon Frankenreiter and G. Love & Special Sauce. Their kinship dominated yet still left room enough for a standout set from New Zealand's all-Maori reggae group Katchafire, plus reliable turns from coastal attractions Common Sense and Ken Garcia Band. (Also on tap: JJ Grey & Mofro's swampy rehashes of the Allman Brothers and the Black Crowes, brought in for a taste of Southern rock. But despite a fine rendition of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long," they came across more generic and lethargic than on record. Perhaps they'd improve at Doheny Blues.)

Sunday's fare is more KROQ-centric in its top tier, with Weezer, Cake and Neon Trees apt to draw a potentially more energetic crowd today than Saturday's chill gathering, which probably would have lit up to mushroom-cloud proportion had there not been “no marijuana” signs posted at the entrance. Still, weekend campers in the audience are getting a good dose of Jamaica out of Day 2, courtesy of Ziggy Marley and Black Uhuru.

“Festival-goers are much more experimental in 2011 than in 2004, the last year that we held Doheny Days," explained Rich Sherman, president of Lake Forest-based Omega Events, which stages both this event and the annual Doheny Blues Festival.

"So it was very important to present an exciting mix of acts, ones that would fit the vibe of the festival. Very few festivals are as fortunate as we are -- our backdrop is the Pacific Ocean, so acts like Ben Harper and Donavon Frankenreiter were a natural fit.”

The mix of acts from a variety of genres will perform amid a setting that includes a Ferris wheel, midway games, four stages and an overall experience that Sherman insists will be different from what Omega puts together for Doheny Blues every May. That makes sense considering the appeal of this lineup skews younger.

“With the addition of Weezer and Ziggy Marley, we have compiled a diverse lineup of artists for Doheny Days, and the response has been incredible," reports Rich Sherman, president of Omega Events, the concert promoter that stages both this event (back after seven years away) and the annual Doheny Blues Festeival.

Managed to get from Fullerton to Dana Point in time to see most of the new Tedescchi Trucks Band at the Doheny Blues Festival, who are positively smokin' an hour into their set just off the shore at Doheny State Beach. But backstage -- and, I presume, elsewhere on site -- there's a poster for something we had heard was coming: the return of Doheny Days to this same location, Sept. 10-11, after several years away.

Slated to appear: Ben Harper, G. Love & Special Sauce, Donavon Frankenreiter, JJ Grey & Mofro (sweet!) and Katchafire, with more to be added, I imagine. We'll have a proper post with prices and details soon enough. My guess is that that's one day, with another lineup to come for Day 2? We shall see.

(P.S.: Two minutes after I posted this, I looked down ... and realized the woman lounging in front of me is holding a program with the same ad. So yeah, word is out.)